We follow Wotan, we follow Brünnhilde, we follow Siegfried, and we never get the impression that one is a hero and the other is pure evil. Instead, you get to know the deep dives into your unconscious motives. “The Ring” is primarily about one big family. We carry this story through generations, children and grandchildren, people and the long history of this family.
There are guests – wanted and unwanted – who interfere in this family story. The basic conflict is the Greek conflict. The motive of anger, the motive of hate, the motive of love, the will to power. This stays within this family and that is my Nietzschean approach. What motivates everyone in your work? It is to know the end: they die, it ends, the time ends. All of them are trying to find a solution to this.
In this summer production, for example, rather than casting Wotan and Brünnhilde one by one throughout the entire cycle, many singers will switch roles from production to production. Is this related to that generational approach or is it a more mundane choice?
As with most things in theater, there are basic mundane things. It means that there are not so many Wagner singers and the number is decreasing every year. There are about five people in the world who can sing Wotan. Bayreuth gives these singers the opportunity to evolve within their songs. For example, over time, someone could sing Fasolt, followed by Wotan.
As for the casting, of course I was very involved with Katarina Wagner. It’s often interesting to see how roles, characters change between works. For example, Irene Theorin sings Brünnhilde in “Walküre” and “Getterdammerung”, and Daniela Koehler in “Siegfried” in between. At the end of Valkyrie, Irene Theorin is trapped on a cliff by Wotan behind a magical fire, but this person has changed.